Considering going to see Interstellar tomorrow, not only for the
eyecandy that it promises but also because the storyline promises to be
something that hasn’t been rehashed a million times before or is just a remake
of something that was done twenty years ago, and then I got to thinking...
That seems a lot like many RPG releases these days...
In the last few months, there’s been a number of new games in the RPG
world, but the ones that seem to be getting most of the interest are the ones
that have already been out...
Usually twenty or thirty years ago...
I got to thinking at this point, because while some games have done
just fine as brand new releases, most of them have the backing of one of the
major RPG houses like Monte Cook or have had significant time and effort (Not
to mention money) lavished on them by the design house responsible for them. The one’s that have been kicking off at a run
and sprinting for the finish line are the games that were really popular when I
used to go to conventions rather than
run them.
Take a look at the list of games that have :
Feng Shui, Mutant Chronicles, Lone Wolf, Paranoia...
All games from the 80’s and 90’s, being offered again for a new
generation, but the interesting thing there is that for the most part, it
doesn’t seem to be the new generation that are picking up on them, it’s the
older generation trying to recapture the magic that they had when playing them
when they first came out. Most of the
talk is about how great the game was when it first came out and how much people
are looking forwards to playing it again.
I’m equally complicit in these things, I remember how much fun all of
these were back then. I remember all the
games above and more besides, all of which are scheduled for a release to a new
crowd of gamers, but I wonder if these will really be of interest to new
gamers, or if it’s just giving all us older guys a second chance for the games
of our youth.
I believe that games have moved on since the times at which most of
these were originally released. When you
look at games like the adventure books that comprised Lone Wolf, where the path
was clearly defined and you had to make sure that you got that path to succeed. In games such as Paranoia, where no one that
I’ve ever talked to has managed to run anything vaguely resembling a campaign
game (or indeed advanced beyond clearance level red without some sort of GM Deus Ex), and in games such as Mutant
Chronicles, where the escalation of warfare was so fast that it could easily
have been 40k the game years before the such a thing was ever envisioned, I
have to ask the question of whether or not another rerelease is what the games
industry needs?
Don’t get me wrong, I have no doubts whatsoever that these games will
be excellent when they come out, but I wonder whether or not the same levels of
effort being put into new games wouldn’t have been a better thing. The thing that made these games great at the
time was that they were new and interesting, they were the things that hadn’t
been done before.
They were the forerunners that got everyone into games, and for me,
that’s a big part of why I haven’t backed a lot of them.
I’ve got no interest in seeing a
new rule set for a game that I already own, if I played it before and remember
it fondly, I’ll still have that book somewhere in the collection and if I want
to play it, I’ll just go get the rulebook and play it. If the new version is offering something new
that might be useful to running the old game, then I might be interested, if
it’s offering something that the old game didn’t (or couldn’t) offer, then I’m
definitely interested, but when all it’s doing is showing me a game that I
already know...
What would I want it for?
Twenty years from now, I don’t want to see another remake of Numenera
or Shadows of Esteren, I hope those games are still running and doing well for
the people that make them, but I don’t want someone to take the concept and say
“I can do this better.” I want people to be asking the question “What can I do new
and interesting?”
So the question today, is am I the only one tired of repeats? Or are people just as interested in a game
whether it’s been out once or five times?
Are some games literally just all about the game to the point that it
doesn’t matter how many editions there are of it?
Thoughts?
